Great White Heron (Ardea occidentalis), Volume 3, Plate 281

Painted in Key West on May 26, 1832. The watercolor contains detailed instructions to Havell: “Keep closely to the Sky in depth and colouring! Have the water of a Pea-green tint. … finish the houses better from the original which you have. …“

One of the finest images in Birds of America. The landscape provides an appropriate stage for this magnificent bird. Great Whites are known to swallow their prey alive, and the act of feeding not only allows Audubon to fit this large bird into the limited space of his picture, it also gives him the chance to display his skills as a comic artist: the fish born aloft by the bird’s heavy bill, so evidently out of its element, displays a look of terrified surprise, its upturned darkening eye providing a sharp contrast with the fiercely yellow eye of the predator who seems to make sure that we are watching him. In this plate, civilization-the houses of Key West-provides a mere backdrop for the main show: the savagely funny drama of death and survival acted out in the foreground. Audubon’s collaborator Bachman tried to civilize these great birds and turn them into pets. But, as Audubon gleefully reports, they would eat a gallon of mullets in a just a few seconds and one of them turned on the Bachman children. Bachman ordered it killed. The Great White Heron is no longer considered a separate species but a color morph of the Great Blue Heron.

From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography

My friend BACHMAN kept two of these birds for many months; but it was difficult for him to procure fish enough for them, as they swallowed a bucketful of mullets in a few minutes, each devouring about a gallon of these fishes. They betook themselves to roosting in a beautiful arbour in his garden; where at night they looked with their pure white plumage like beings of another world. It is a curious fact, that the points of their bills, of which an inch at least had been broken, grew again, and were as regularly shaped at the end of six months as if nothing had happened to them. In the evening or early in the morning, they would frequently set, like pointer dogs, at moths which hovered over the flowers, and with a well-directed stroke of their bill seize the fluttering insect and instantly swallow it. On many occasions, they also struck at chickens, grown fowls and ducks, which they would tear up and devour. Once a cat which was asleep in the sunshine, on the wooden steps of the viranda, was pinned through the body to the boards, and killed by one of them. At last they began to pursue the younger children of my worthy friend, who therefore ordered them to be killed. One of them was beautifully mounted by my assistant Mr. HENRY WARD, and is now in the Museum of Charleston.